Nazi Hunter (95 page)

37
. Though among the most German of names, Walburga is derived from the name of an Englishwoman, St Walpurgis, an eighth-century
missionary and abbess in Germany. The German
Walpurgisnacht,
witches’, sabbath, is supposed to take place on 30 April, the eve of her feast day.

38
. Wiesenthal was talking in the context of a worldwide furore that attended a controversial 1985 visit by US President Ronald Reagan to
lay wreaths of reconciliation upon
Waffen SS
graves in a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany. ‘Those people buried in Bitburg were from
Der Führer
[regiment],’ Wiesenthal pointed out, ‘and some of them even have Ukrainian names.’

39
. Claus Philipp Maria Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg (1907–44), a young colonel who had lost his left eye and right hand fighting
for Germany, tried to blow up Hitler on 20 July 1944 by planting a time-bomb in Hitler’s conference room. It killed several people present, but not Hitler. Stauffenberg and four other
conspirators were apprehended and shot to death hours after the bomb went off, but the blood-bath that followed led to 7000 arrests and 5000 deaths – including that of World War II’s
greatest German hero, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, ‘The Desert Fox’ of the North African campaign. Rommel had known some of the conspirators, but refused to participate in their plot.
For not giving them away, Rommel was offered the choice of standing trial and jeopardizing his family or taking poison; he chose poison. Though Himmler vowed in August 1944 that ‘the
Stauffenberg family will be exterminated, root and branch’, the Count’s pregnant wife and four children survived the war in a concentration camp, where the fifth child was born and
their name was changed to Meister.

40
. edema: swelling due to an excess of fluid in the tissues.

41
. Rudolf Höss (1900–47), hanged by Poland at Auschwitz after the war, is not to be confused with Rudolf Hess
(1894–1987), Hitler’s deputy leader of the Nazi Party until May 1941, when, in the delusion that he could make peace with enemy Britain to unite against the Slavs, he flew an
unauthorized solo flight and parachuted into Scotland. Jailed by the British for the rest of the war, Hess was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against peace and sentenced to life imprisonment. The
last surviving Nuremberg defendant, he was the only inmate of Spandau Prison in West Berlin when he committed suicide at the age of ninety-three.

42
. Adolf Eichmann, too, was interned in Weiden, but Captain Mengele was in officers’ quarters while Colonel Eichmann was
masquerading as an enlisted man.

43
. As was to be the case throughout his hunt for Mengele, Wiesenthal was far off target. In his 1967 as well as 1989 memoirs, Simon
claimed that Mengele didn’t leave Europe until 1951, and via Spain.

44
. It was Sassen who introduced Mengele to Eichmann, but Mengele found Eichmann rather shabby as well as dangerous to be with, and
therefore avoided his company, although the two fugitives met from time to time at the ABC Café in downtown Buenos Aires.

45
. In the sixteen-page ‘Where is Bormann?’ chapter of his 1967 memoir, Wiesenthal concluded that Bormann was ‘most
probably now living near the frontier of Argentina and Chile as I write this, early in 1966.’ In his 1988 memoir’s sixteen-page chapter on missing Nazis, ‘Declared Dead’,
Simon devotes only a pair of pages to Bormann and concludes that ‘today I harbour no more doubts that the Federal Prosecutor in Frankfurt is correct in his view that, during the night of
2–3 May 1945 in Berlin, Bormann committed suicide when he saw that it was impossible to flee.`

46
. Langbein broke with communism when the Red Army crushed the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

47
. A wealthy former champagne merchant, von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for war crimes.

48
. In his 1988 memoir, Wiesenthal misspells Sedlmeier’s name as Sedlm
a
ier.

49
. The professor never collected any cash for his good deed. The reward offerers were so certain Mengele was alive that, in most cases,
they called for his capture or information leading to his capture – and seldom specified ‘dead or alive’. Information leading to exhumation six years after burial was not deemed
worthy of a cash prize.

50
. Schuschnigg emigrated to the US after the war and spent twenty years as a professor of political science in the Midwest, mostly at St
Louis University in Missouri. Naturalized as an American citizen in 1956, he returned to Austria in 1967 to ‘live in peace and perhaps do a little writing’ and died in 1977 at the age
of seventy-nine in rented rooms in a village in the Tyrol.

51
. Actually, Hartheim had been a home for retarded children since 1898.

52
. Dr Rudolf Lohnauer of Linz, chief physician at Hartheim, committed suicide with his entire family after the war; his deputy, Dr Georg
Renno, arrested in Frankfurt in 1963, was excused from euthanasia trials due to ill health and lived a good life recuperating in the Black Forest spa area of Germany. Franz Höldl, the
chauffeur who wouldn’t implicate Stangl in the killings, was given a four-year sentence. Wiesenthal says that a file he handed personally to the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General
of Austria in 1964, implicating other Austrians in Hartheim, has never been acted upon.

53
. Bishop von Galen (1878–1946) was finally arrested after 20 July 1944’s assassination attempt on Hitler, but survived the
war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was named Cardinal in 1945, as was the outspoken Bishop von Preysing (1880–1950) of Berlin a year later.

54
. Only two Jews out of 600,000 survived Belzec: soap manufacturer Rudolf Reder, and metal-worker Chaim Hirszman, who was killed by
Polish anti-Semites after the war. Only two out of 400,000 survived Chelmno: Simon Srebnik and Mordecai Podchlebnik, who both went to Israel after the war. Sobibor, which operated from the spring
of 1942 until the fall of 1943, killed 300,000; there were fifty survivors. The 400 days of Treblinka (July 1942–August 1943) left 1,200,000 dead; only sixty lived.

55
. Such was the stench of Belzec that it penetrated passenger cars of trains passing through the town, even when their windows were
sealed. The townspeople of Belzec said that the odour of rotting bodies grew worse each day and even the SS complained when the human cesspool seeped out in front of their barracks and mess
hall.

56
. Hermann Michel escaped to Egypt after the war, Stangl told biographer Gitta Sereny.

57
. Eberl committed suicide in 1948.

58
. Extradited to the Soviet Union in 1984, Fedorenko was executed by a firing squad in 1987.

59
. Simon Wiesenthal’s work in the Demjanjuk case was peripheral until his trial in 1987, when documents supplied by Wiesenthal,
plus his expertise, proved helpful to prosecutors seeking to identify Demjanjuk as ‘Ivan the Terrible’.

60
. The Freud sister was either Marie, eighty-two, or Pauline, eighty, both of whom perished in Treblinka. Two other Freud sisters also
died in the camps: Rosa, eighty-four, in Auschwitz, and Adolfine, eighty-one, in Theresienstadt.

61
. Members of Italy’s dominant postwar political party, usually closely aligned with the Vatican.

62
.
Curia Romana
: the papal court.

63
.
Flucht von Nürberg
, published in the Stangls’ home town of Wels in 1969, was written between 1964 and 1966 by
‘Werner Brockdorff’, a pseudonym for Alfred Jarschel, former head of the Hitler Youth. He died in 1967.

64
. Only one defendant, male nurse Otto Horn, was acquitted. The stiffest sentence under West German law, life imprisonment, went to
Stangl’s deputy, Kurt Franz, whose scrapbook of Treblinka, ‘The Best Years of My Life’, was used as evidence against him. He was paroled in 1993 at the age of 79.

65
. The United States did not ratify the Convention against Genocide until late 1988.

66
. Artukovic, eighty-eight, who was Interior Minister of the wartime Croatian fascist puppet state, died in a Zagreb prison hospital in
1988, before his execution could be carried out. Demjanjuk was later freed by Israel when it became apparent that some other guard named Ivan was ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ Demjanjuk returned
to Cleveland, where in 2002 a federal judge stripped him of his US citizenship for lying in his application by concealing his past employment at Treblinka and Sobibor.

67
. Later a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winner for his book
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
.

68
.
‘On the eve of the Jewish New Year? . . .’

69
. In all, some 360,000 prisoners from twenty-nine European countries were murdered at Majdanek during World War II.

70
. Coming of age in the month Hitler annexed Austria, Rösch was too old to be a Hitler Youth and neither Wiesenthal nor anyone else
but Kreisky has ever accused him of being one.

71
.
Betar
(short for
Berit Trumpeldor
) was an activist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia. Spreading
through Eastern Europe in the late twenties and early thirties, it claimed its brown shirts symbolized the earth of the Jewish homeland. It exists in Israel today as a right-wing youth organization
whose anthem calls for a Jewish state ‘on both banks of the Jordan’.

72
. Simon said this in German, in which the last word is more emphatic:
Schweinefleisch
.

73
. From
Staatspolizei
report SCH – P-50.207/75 dated 13 October 1975.

74
.
B’nai B’rith
(Hebrew for ‘sons of the covenant’) is an international Jewish organization founded in
New York City in 1843. It institutes and administers programmes to promote the social, educational, and cultural betterment of Jews and of the public at large.

75
. Axis: a term stemming from the expression ‘Rome-Berlin axis’, referring to a 1936 accord between Hitler and Mussolini;
later applied to the military alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan with the on-and-off adherence of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia.

76
.
Kurt Waldheim’s Wartime Years: A Documentation
(1987), a 299-page book compiled by his son Gerhard, former Austrian
Foreign Minister Karl Gruber (who hired Kurt Waldheim after the war), and two Foreign Ministry officials working for the President, Drs Ralph Scheide and Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff.

77
. Pardoned and released in 1953, List died in Garmisch in 1971.

78
. Kurt Waldheim’s father, Walter, was arrested briefly by the Nazis in 1938 and forced to resign his post as a District Inspector
of Schools because of his pro-Dollfuss, Austrofascist views.

79
.
Cominform
: Communist Information Bureau, an international organization founded by Stalin in 1946 for the exchange of data
among communist parties. It was dissolved in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev as a gesture of reconciliation with Tito.

80
. The German town with an SS cemetery to which the President of the United States was tricked by his German hosts into visiting in
1985.

81
. Kahane was shot to death by an Egyptian-American in New York City on 5 November 1990.

82
. An institution founded in Los Angeles in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier (pronounced
Hire
) for Holocaust education and remembrance
as well as to ‘honour a person who not only did something about our subject, but dedicated his whole life since Nineteen Forty-Five to it.’ The Wiesenthal Centre also serves as tangible
confirmation of Simon’s immortality: the work he began will go on in his name long after his lifetime.

83
. Actually, the UN archive of 40,000 sealed files on war criminals, suspects, and witnesses was on the eleventh and twelfth floors of an
office building on Park Avenue South.

84
. As a leader of the extremist Stern Gang in 1948, Shamir was accused of complicity in the assassination of the UN’s Swedish
mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte.

85
. An oblong container mounted to consecrate a Jewish home.

86
. In a second-century Roman dialogue appriopriated by Goethe and Walt Disney, the apprentice, in his master’s absence, tries one
of his spells and can’t countermand it.